It is estimated that in the United States alone, over 300 million scrap tires are generated annually. Tires are not desirable at landfills because of their large volume and propensity to trap methane gasses that can damage landfill liners. Moreover, incinerating tires to dispose of them results in substantial pollution. With such a staggering number of used tires, the need for recycling in an environmentally sustainable way is apparent and well known.
There are various options to recycle used tires. For example, looking again at the United States, some 30 million used tires are recycled into various ground rubber applications each year. One ground rubber application is processing used tires into landscape mulch for business, residential, public, or roadside application.
Various apparatuses in the prior art process used consumer and small commercial sized tires. However, the type and size of used tires generated from industrial mining vehicles pose unique challenges for consumer and small commercial tire recycling equipment. Specifically, vehicles in the mining industry produce outsized used tires—often up to fourteen feet in diameter and five feet wide—with tread thicknesses far thicker than those found in consumer and small commercial sized tires. The sheer size, weight, and rubber volume of these type of tires render the known art useless for effectively processing used tires into applications such as landscape mulch. Current machines are simply not designed to rasp and/or cut tires of the dimensions described above, let alone to do so dependably and reliably.